Feature

Can we have some more?

New Labour promised to take swift, decisive action to improve school meals but has served up scraps, says Charles Webster

Everyone is sad that the climbing frames at Cartown Primary have been condemned on health and safety grounds. Because they would cost £30,000 to renew, there is no possibility of replacing them. There have been no serious accidents on these frames over the last 20 years, but with children’s health it is essential to take no risks.

However it is also important to avoid double standards. So what other risks are being routinely taken with the health of children at Cartown Primary? Any impartial regulator would immediately conclude that the meals served at the school should be condemned on the grounds that they are damaging the children’s health.

The regulator would then investigate other schools in the vicinity and discover that a horrific school meals regime has prevailed for many years. They would also discover that in the face of complaints extending over many years, a wall of official complacency has protected this scandalous situation. That is the social reality which should be addressed by the new school meals regulations.

In 1980 the Thatcher government controversially abolished long-standing nutritional standards for school meals. When it was elected, New Labour, In line with its ‘Healthier Nation’ and ‘Healthier Schools’ policies, began to consult on the reform of school meals, including reintroducing nutritional standards.

On 12 July 2000, the school standards minister unveiled the government’s plans for school meals, the central features of which are nutritional guidelines for each school age group. Guidance on these regulations was published in the autumn and they will finally become effective in April 2001.

The battle to establish school meals as a fundamental element in the work of schools has been protracted and never more than partly successful. It is one of those social services that suffers on account of awkward division of departmental responsibility at national and local level.

Writing about the situation at the beginning of the Second World War, welfare state pioneer Richard Titmuss complained that the ‘caterers’ need to make a profit was reflected in the poverty of the meals and the lack of decency in serving them’. On the grounds of enlightened policies adopted during the war, Titmuss believed that the school meal would become a ‘social service, fused into school life and making its own contribution to the physical nurture of the children and to their social education’.

Titmuss would be dismayed to discover how completely the hard-won gains of social reformers have been thrown away in recent history. The Conservatives’ 1980 Education Act abandoned minimum nutritional standards. This transfer to a permissive system of school meals was particularly unfortunate at a time of escalating poverty. It is an added irony that the policy flew in the face of the 1980 Black report, which warned of the dangers to health due to declining nutritional standards among children in impoverished families.

But the Conservative government followed its doctrinaire course and ignored expert groups pointing to the health risks stemming from failure to protect school children’s diet. Only now, in the light of evidence about the source of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are we realising the true magnitude of the dangers to health which were unleashed by the degenerate school meals system.

To its credit, New Labour made school meals one of its public health priorities. The Blair government promised prompt action to reintroduce minimum nutritional standards and restore school meals to a central place in the educational and health services. Action was urgently needed to improve the nutritional quality of meals and to increase their take-up, especially among the four million children living in households with incomes of less than half the national average.

By 1997, children’s diet was clearly a cause of mounting concern, but the government had the advantage of enlightened advice on remedial action from such bodies as the Caroline Walker Trust, the National Heart Forum, the Child Poverty Action Group and the Food Commission, as well as a variety of specialist medical research groups.

However, as in so many policy arenas, New Labour’s response has been slower and less radical than was promised. The new regulations will not come into force until April 2001 and on the most important policy issues the government has watered down its recommendations until they represent only a minimal advance on the present arrangements.

Appeasing private enterprise catering interests has taken precedence over children’s health. So the government finds itself in conflict with the trades unions, expert groups and even the Labour-dominated House of Commons education select committee. The new regulations are being particularly criticised for the subjectivity of the new standards and the lack of arrangements for monitoring and enforcing standards.

Nutrient-based standards were accepted without demur before 1980, but now they are rejected by the government on the grounds that they are too difficult for caterers to understand and too inconvenient for them to implement and monitor. Just in case the caterers should be further inconvenienced, the government is to leave monitoring standards to the providers’ discretion.

This situation lacks any credibility and must be deeply embarrassing to the new Health Development Authority, the Advisory Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy and the Food Standards Agency. But our main sympathies are for the children of Cartown Primary, and millions of their contemporaries elsewhere, who will now be forced to endure meals of a shamefully low standard for the foreseeable future.